Was transferring some screen shots from my iPhone with Mac OS X’s “Image Capture” app when I discovered that the sort-by-date seems to have some problems:
Yes, it’s sorting by ASCII string value of the formatted date. 3/4 comes after 3/22, and 3/22/08 comes after 3/20/09. How’d Steve Jobs let this one out the door? I can only assume nobody had a memory card or camera with old photos on it when they tested…
Clearing out old backups, I stumbled on this half-written blog post from 2004 about my “switch”.
While they may not be the most earthshaking issues, I’m disappointed that things have not changed much in four years — I hit the same stumbling blocks when playing with my Linux netbook today…
Last October I got a PowerBook. I’d been mainly a Linux ‘n’ BSD guy for years, bouncing between Gnome, KDE, and alternative desktops every few months, though I’d been using Mac OS X at work for some months.
Instantly the little PB became my sole desktop environment — my poor x86 box sat unused for weeks at a time except as a file server or occasional test machine, despite sporting a faster processor and whatnot.
What was so darn great about the Mac, other than just that it was portable?
I still do much of my file management at a bash prompt rather than in Finder (and I’ve never much liked Nautilus or Konqueror).
Things that are darned good:
Application launching
The way the dock works in Mac OS X is just darn great. Sure there are corner cases where things go wonky, but most of the time it’s the way I like it. Things to note:
- It’s very easy to keep a running application permanently in the dock.
You started something up once or twice, then you decide you’re going to want it all the time and have it available for easy launching. On the Mac, you just drag its icon to the place on the dock where you’d most like to have it.
That’s it.
Nothing more.
No five-level-deep right-click context menu[1]. No trying to figure out the correct command line and which of five ‘standard’ icon directories they stashed the application’s icon in. No hunting down the secret ‘remote’ launcher command so that multiple invocations work correctly.
[1] I’m not shitting you about five levels. That’s how many levels of popup menus I actually had on screen adding Konqueror to my Gnome launcher panel.
OH HOW I WISH this were as easy in Gnome and KDE. Just sort of hope that a .desktop file was installed for you and pray it’s somewhere you can find it.
Even once you’ve got something in your panel/kicker your pain is not over. Rearranging items in the panels is a horrible experience and often ends up with ugly, uneven spacing, stuck drag modes, or other annoyances. Drag and drop sometimes works.
Application switching
After months with the Mac I can’t imagine anymore how anyone lives with a taskbar model. Virtual desktops are necessary just to keep the taskbar manageable. Yuck!
I simply haven’t missed virtual desktops on the Mac. (If I wanted them, there are third party apps that do it.) Nor do I use Exposé very frequently. (But it looks neat!) Most of the time I find it quite sufficient to just switch between applications with command+tab.
The distinction I need to point out is between switching applications on the Mac and switching windows in Gnome/KDE/Windows. I’ll generally be for instance switching between a text editor and a browser (with documentation, say). Having fewer applications to deal with rather than ten billion windows makes this usually a little more manageable.
But, to each their own.
Application distribution
The typical application distribution model on Linux is “the operating system vendor will distribute the app.”
From there I presumably would have gone on to whinge about dependency hell, the virtual impossibility of manual uninstallation of apps from the Unix filesystem hierarchy, and other desktop integration difficulties when installing third-party software.
We finally replaced my fiancée’s ancient PC with a shiny new Dell laptop. While ordering, I couldn’t help myself and tossed in a Inspiron Mini 9 for myself:
This little cutie weighs in at just 2.26 pounds, less than half of my MacBook’s hefty 5 pounds. I’ve found that the Mini is much more back-friendly than my MacBook; I can painlessly lug it to the office with my laptop bag slung over my shoulder (easier for getting on and off the subway) instead of nerding it up in backpack mode.
The top-end model I picked packs 16GB storage and 1GB RAM running on a 1.6 GHz Atom processor — far more powerful than the computer I took with me to college in 1997. Admittedly, my iPhone also beats that computer at 8GB/128MB/300MHz vs 6.4GB/64MB/266MHz. 
The compact form factor does have some impact on usability, though. The 1024×600 screen sometimes feels too tight for vertical space, but they include a handy full-screen zoom hotkey for the window manager which opens things up.
The keyboard feels a bit cramped, and some of the keys are in surprising places (the apostrophe and hyphen are frequent offenders), but it’s still a lot easier to type serious notes or emails on than the iPhone. I had to disable the trackpad’s click and scrolling options to keep from accidentally pasting random text with my palms while typing…
The machine shipped with a customized Ubuntu distribution which is fully functional; they include a “friendly” launcher app which can be easily disabled, and even the launcher doesn’t interfere too badly. The desktop launch bar that’s crept into Gnome nicely handles my “I need Spotlight to launch stuff with the keyboard” fix. 
Firefox works fine (after uninstalling lots of Yahoo! extensions), Thunderbird installed easily enough, and I even got Skype to work with my USB headset! (AT&T’s international roaming charges can bite me…)
The biggest obstacle for me to use this machine every day is my Yojimbo addiction. I use Yojimbo for darn near everything — random notes, travel plans, budgeting, grocery lists, recipes, encrypted password stores, saving articles and documentation for future references. It’s insanely easy to use, the search works, I don’t have to remember where I saved anything, and it syncs across all my Macs. But… it’s Mac-only. 
I’m trying out WebJimbo, which provides an AJAX-y web interface for remotely accessing your Yojimbo notes. It’s very impressive for what it does, but I’m hitting some nasty brick walls: editing a note with formatting drops all the formatting, but I use embedded screen shots and coloring extensively in my notes.
I’ve seen some reports of people hacking Mac OS X onto the Dell Mini — very tempting to avoid OS switching overhead. But I think if I really want that, eventually I should just suck it up and buy a MacBook Air. The form factor is the same as my MacBook (full keyboard, roomier 1280×800 screen), but at 3 pounds it’s much closer to the Mini than to my regular MacBook in weight, so should be about as back-friendly for the subway commute and air travel.
Of course, the Air costs $1799 and I got my tricked-out Mini for about $400, so… I’ll save my pennies and see. 
Dude, there’s a WordPress posting app for iPhone… Tee-hee! (it’s open source too, assuming Apple doesn’t crush the developer over the mysterious SDK NDA …)
Nothing earth-shattering in the announcement, but some pleasing things…
Otherwise it’s pretty much the same, hardware-wise. New software will be available on the old model too, and there’s still not a model with 32GB storage. 16′s not quite enough for my full music library, so I don’t have a huge incentive to upgrade from the 8GB model unless the reception really is good enough to… say… successfully make phone calls from my flat.
As for pricing… the purchase price is lower, but the the plan’s an extra $10/month, which more than makes up the savings over the contract lifetime.
On the plus side, the draconian requirement to activate your contract at the store means our European friends will stop pestering us to buy iPhones for them to take home and unlock. >:D
While rebooting to install software updates…
One of the oh-so-cute features of the iPhone is visual voicemail, the “duh” feature of showing you an actual on-screen list of your voicemails instead of making you sit through voice prompts.
Bad: My iPhone mysteriously reverted to the classic “press 7 to delete” system when I changed rate plans a couple weeks ago… with voice mail disabled altogether so callers couldn’t leave messages until I noticed it and set up a new password.
A little Googling indicates this is a fairly common mix-up, and the only way to restore visual voicemail is to call AT&T tech support and have them fiddle with your account settings.
Good: AT&T tech support was able to fix the account settings so it works again… after a half hour on hold…
WTF: The AT&T tech swore that visual voicemail doesn’t work if you have a WiFi connection active. He had me disable WiFi while initially testing it, then when I asked him about it he told me outright that Visual Voicemail only works on the EDGE network and therefore you must turn off WiFi to check your voicemail.
This is demonstrably false; just to confirm I hadn’t been crazy for the couple of months my voicemail was working just fine, I turned WiFi back on, left myself a voicemail, and retrieved it just fine in all its visual glory.
It’s entirely possible that the voicemails still download over EDGE, but having the WiFi up doesn’t seem to interfere at all.
Now if they can just add a feature to route phone calls over WiFi, I could actually get calls through from my flat.
It’s so easy to find all the files in my download directory thanks to Leopard’s stacks!
Uhhhh, yeah. Thanks.
So, Apple pushed out Safari 3.1 for Mac and Windows today, which adds support for the HTML 5 <video> tag… unfortunately, without native Ogg support.
Fortunately, it uses QuickTime as the backend, so if you have the XiphQT plugins installed, it will play Ogg Vorbis and Theora files. Yay!
Filed two three bugs for our video plugin detection on Safari…
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